I doubt if anyone who knew me as Benny Daniel could have predicted that I would become the storyteller Benyamin. Not even a palmist or a fortune-teller. Which is why people who knew me in my childhood and youth are baffled when they hear I am a writer now. In fact, I am as surprised as they are.
I cannot recall a single factor that could have directed me to writing. There are no writers in my family. I hadn’t spent long years in deep study of literature. I hadn’t fraternised with great littérateurs or known any editors. My favourite subject in school was neither Malayalam nor literature. To the question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I don’t remember ever answering ‘A writer.’
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
How then did it happen?
Becoming a writer was not my fate, it was my destiny. In my view, fate and destiny are not the same. Fate is like a final decree; destiny reveals the beginning of a path (that you may choose not to follow). In our daily lives, we meet many people who flee their destiny, like the Prophet Jonah, only to end up in their own private shipwrecks. Wasn’t it Paulo Coelho who wrote, “And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”? I would amend it to: ‘If you have a destiny, circumstances will conspire to reach you to that point.’ If I had taken even a single step to the right or left of the path I chose, I wouldn’t have become a writer. Circumstances and opportunities stood me in front of authorship and told me: Here’s a path that you can take… if you like.
I was fortunate to be born to an ordinary housewife and a taxi-driver with little education. Their dreams for me were limited and I did not have to bear the burden of excessive expectations. Since my only sibling was a much older sister, sitting and dreaming by myself was my childhood habit. I believe the three siblings who died in my mother’s womb were sacrificial offerings served up for my writing and my dreaming. They released me into the hands of my own solitude.
ADVERTISEMENT
While it is easy for me to write about it now, my childhood was a procession of ailments. Rare are the diseases that didn’t caress me. I can still recall the words of neighbours and relatives: ‘This child will die of tuberculosis or something.’ Those days, I used to pray to survive till I turned 20 or had savoured my first kiss.
As a boy, my dreams were full of cricket, not writing. I used to play for hours in the courtyard of my house, imagining a large ground, a full team of players and their field placings. Many years went by before I realised that cricket was not my destiny. Nevertheless, it was in that imaginary cricket field that I started dreaming of vast canvases. My characters of today are only a continuation of the transmigratory and time-warp experiences I’ve had in the one-man cricket match where I was batsman, bowler, fielder, wicket-keeper and umpire.
Swimming words
I had no truck with the literary events or even the library in our town. However, among my cricket buddies, there was a small group that discussed the stories they had read. When we went swimming in the river close to my house, they would talk about Naipaul, Rushdie, Bimal Mitra and Anand. I stuck close to them as a listener. Something in their words tugged at my heartstrings. Perhaps that was the inspiration for me to leaf through random books when I went to the library to read Sportstar . But the spark that was lit was extinguished rather quickly.
I went back to my favourite subject of mathematics, joined a polytechnic institute and studied electronics. That was in the knitwear capital of India — Tiruppur. When I graduated with a first class, I got an offer to work in Bahrain. For an ordinary Malayali, it was a fabulous prospect. So, aged 21 and with a very happy heart, I boarded a plane to the land of deserts.
Inner voice
My early years in the Gulf were spent in the maintenance department of a bank, hardly back-breaking work. I had very little to do, but I had to be alert and awake at all times. It was during breaks in my work hours — which had both the tedium and stress of being on call all the time — that I started to read seriously. I lived alone. After eight hours of work, it was 16 hours of vacuity. I fought and overcame the boredom of those interminable hours through reading. For a while I tried to fill the emptiness by watching movies, but they couldn’t provide whatever was needed to satisfy my inner self. In other words, it was a confluence of favourable circumstances along with my own interest and commitment that brought me to reading.
Manama, the city where I lived, had alcohol, gambling, dance bars — nothing was proscribed. I was of an age when I could have strayed into any of these vices, but in the midst of all these temptations, it was reading I chose. Availability of books was the next hurdle. Circumstances favoured me again. For one, friends from home started sending me books instead of chips and pickles. And I discovered a private library in one of the streets of Manama. I borrowed and read acclaimed Malayalam novels and the classics of world literature.
Paying heed to some inner voice, I started writing synopses of the books I read, noting down my favourite passages. Recently, I chanced upon one of those diaries. Its frenetic quality is shocking. I used to read 150 to 200 books a year. This intense reading must have stroked awake words lying dormant deep in my mind. They emerged as long, expansive letters to my friends. Chary of taking ownership of my ideas and thoughts, I’d footnote everything: written by x writer, read in y novel, stated by z friend, etc. It must be the same inhibition and diffidence which propelled me, when I started to write, to hide behind the pseudonym of Benyamin. At the same time, the confidence their replies gave me, affirming that my long epistles were not tiresome and that they envied their originality, was not inconsiderable.
There were, thus, seven long years of diary entries and epistolary exercises. Then I wrote my first short story. The acceptance it found encouraged me to write more. And the plaudits I received from readers encouraged me to write even more.
I often wonder if I have fallen into an abyss of dreams, back when I was a sickly child, and if my current literary life is a vision that I am trapped in. I feel I could not have entered the realm of writing through any path other than a dream. God, let me not wake up.
The writer's Aadujeevitham (Goat Days) won him the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award. Jasmine Days is his second novel.